Hercules Segers
? Amsterdam, c. 1615 - c. 1630
printed from two plates: one tone plate entirely covered with fine crosshatching in line etching printed in bluish grey and a second plate with tone and highlights using stopping-out and direct biting and a second biting with line etching, etching trials, printed in black; framing line in brown ink
height c. 120 mm × width c. 203 mm (trimmed within the printed surface)
stamped on verso: lower centre, with the mark of the City of Amsterdam (L. 11)
One state (unique impression).
Two diagonal folds over entire sheet and in lower left corner; small hole in centre; purplish-brown oil spots in uppermost zone; brown foxing at lower righ; verso: brown oil stains, strip of transparent grey paint on left (counterproof from another print?).
...; collection Michiel Hinloopen (1619-1708), Amsterdam;1 by whom bequeathed to the City of Amsterdam (L. 11), 1708; from which on loan to the museum (L. 2228a), since 1885
Object number: RP-P-H-OB-858
Credit line: On loan from the City of Amsterdam
Copyright: Public domain
Castles, Ruins and Other Buildings
The buildings in Segers’s topographical prints and paintings are usually depicted from a great distance and subsumed in the landscape. Architecture, however, did capture his interest, but judging from the buildings encountered in his etchings, they are primarily related to structures from a far-flung past: imaginary or not, they are medieval castles, ancient ruins or old houses.2 Moreover, in seventeenth-century inventories, mention is made of four small painted 'ruins' ('ruïnes') by his hand.3 The structure of stones and dilapidated, overgrown walls, like the weathered rocks in mountain landscapes, appear to be an ideal subject for Segers’s restless etching needle and graphic experiments.
Huigen Leeflang, 2016
Hercules Segers (Haarlem c. 1589/90 - ? 1633/40)
No baptismal record has been found, but he was probably born in Haarlem in c. 1589/90.4 The artist mentioned his age twice: once in 1614 stating he was a twenty-four-year-old man from Haarlem and once in 1623 were he mentions he is about thirty-four years old.5 His parents, Pieter Segers (c. 1564-1611/12) and Cathelijne Hercules (d. after 1618), both came from Ghent. Hercules was most likely their second son, since he was named after the patronymic of his mother. Whether he had more siblings than his younger brother, Laurens (c. 1592/93-after 1616), is not known.6
Hercules’ father was a merchant in Haarlem and Amsterdam, but chose for his son another profession.7 The denomination of the family is unknown, but mostly likely they were not Mennonites, as often claimed in the literature. Hercules became an apprentice of the painter Gillis van Coninxloo (1544-1606/07), a landscape artist from Antwerp, who had a workshop at his house on the Oude Turfmarkt.8 Following Van Coninxloo’s death, Segers undoubtedly finished his training in another workshop. However, no documents have survived to confirm this.9
In 1612 Segers left Amsterdam and settled in Haarlem. His name appears in the registration of the Guild of St. Luke of 1612.10 In the summer of 1614 Segers was again documented as living in Amsterdam, together with his extramarital daughter, Nelletje Hercules (?-?). At the age of twenty-four, he married the forty-year-old Anna van der Bruggen (c. 1574-?).11 Apparently, he was doing well financially, able in 1619 to purchase a large new house on the Lindengracht in Amsterdam called De Hertog van Gelre.12 In his etching View through the Window of Segers’s House toward the Noorderkerk (HB 41, inv. no RP-P-H-OB-857), he captured the view from a window in the attic of that house. A decade later, his fortunes changed and he had to sell his house and dismantle his workshop. He moved to Utrecht in 1631.13 Segers seems to have been active as an art dealer. In May 1631 he sold around 137 paintings to the Amsterdam dealer Jean Antonio Romiti (?-?), including a painting by the young Rembrandt (1606-1669).14 In 1632 he was living in The Hague and was involved in the sale of about 180 paintings. The only other evidence of his stay there are two documents of 1633, one concerning the art deal and the other regarding the rental of a house.15 His name does not appear again in the archives, not even in burial records. He probably died between 1633 and 1640.16
Segers addressed himself multiple times as painter, such as on 28 January 1633 when he was mentioned as ‘painter, at present living in The Hague’ (‘schilder, jegenwoordigh wonende alhier in Den Hage’).17 However, it is his highly original printed oeuvre to which the artist owes his present day fame. Although he specialized in mountain landscapes, it is doubtful if he ever saw a mountain in real life. His depictions of ancient Italian ruins all derive from prints by other artists, and it is unlikely he travelled to Italy himself.
One painting by Segers suggests that he travelled to the Southern Netherlands. His topographical View of Brussels from the Northeast in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne (P 16, inv. no. WRM Dep. 249) is in all probability a reflection of a visit to that city.18 His landscapes and city views depicting places in the provinces of Holland, Utrecht and Gelderland are also most likely based on personal observations and drawings ‘from life’.
Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678) was the only contemporary to write about Segers. In his Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkunst (Introduction to the Academy of Painting) of 1678, he described an artist who had great talent but did not receive much recognition during his life. Shortly after his death, however, his prints were most sought after by art lovers who were willing to pay enormous prices for impressions of his prints.19 However this may be, there are indications that Segers’s work was appreciated during his lifetime and well into the seventeenth century by a small group of art lovers and artists.20
The paintings that can be attributed to Segers with certainty are a Woodland Path in a private collection in Norway, four mountain landscapes (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Mauritshuis, The Hague; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), five Dutch panoramic landscapes (two in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster, on loan from a private collection; private collection in the Netherlands), four hybrid landscapes (private collection in Brussels; Galerie Hans, Hamburg; Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) and a View of Brussels (Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne). His etchings are extremely rare. In total fifty-three different etchings have survived in 182 impressions – twenty-two of which are unique. Twenty-four of the known etchings depict mountain landscapes, two Biblical scenes, eight panoramic landscapes, six forest-landscapes and trees, eleven ruins and other buildings, four seascapes and ships, and three extraordinary prints show a rearing horse, a skull and a still life with books.
The chronology of Segers’s oeuvre is hard to determine because none of his works is dated. His development as an artist between 1615 and 1630 has traditionally been described as that of a specialist in mountain landscapes based on the tradition set by Pieter Bruegel (1526/30-1569) and his successors towards a pioneer in Dutch panoramic landscapes. Dendrochronological research on the panels he used, however, suggests that Segers made different types of work throughout his career. He created a new kind of panoramic views with a lowered horizon and impressive skies that anticipated the works of the younger generation of specialists in Dutch landscapes, such as Pieter de Molijn (1595-1661) and Jan van Goyen (1596-1656). Simultaneously he created, both in painting and etching, fantastic mountain views and mountain landscapes.
Segers’s graphic experiments with tone and colour are closely related to his work as a painter. The materials he used for his prints, such as pigments, priming and linen, are what one expects to find in a seventeenth-century painter’s workshop rather than in that of a printmaker. Segers’s etchings bear witness to an exceptionally inventive use of printmaking techniques. No printmaker before him had experimented on such a grand scale with the possibilities of copper-plates, etching grounds, etching needles and other graphic tools or with printing and touching-up in colour.
Jaap van der Veen, 2016/Huigen Leeflang, 2020
References
A. Bredius, ‘Iets over Hercules Segers’, in F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis. Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers…, 7 vols., Rotterdam, 1877-90, IV (1882), pp. 314-15; I.H. van Eeghen, ’De ouders van Hercules Segers’, Maandblad Amstelodamum 55 (1968), no. 4, pp. 73-76; J.Z. Kannegieter, ‘Het huis van Hercules Segers op de Lindengracht te Amsterdam’, Oud Holland 59 (1942), nos. 5/6, pp. 150-57; H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lukasgilde te Haarlem, 2 vols., Alphen aan den Rijn 1980, II, p. 1035; J. van der Veen, ‘”Hercules Segers, disregarded and yet a great artist”: A Sketch of his Life’, in H. Leeflang and P. Roeloefs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols., exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2016-17, I, pp. 17-36; H. Leeflang, ‘”For he also printed paintings”: Hercules Segers’s Painterly Prints’, in ibid., pp. 39-73; P. Roeloefs, ‘Hercules Segers, the Painter’, in ibid, pp. 111-38
Alongside prints with extant and imaginary medieval structures, Segers also made three prints of ancient Roman ruins (the present work; one sheet in the Graphische Sammlung, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, HB 43a-b, inv. no. F.P. 12173 and inv. no. F.P. 12173 verso; and another print in the Rijksmuseum, HB 45, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-859). They have been adduced as proof that the artist visited Italy and drew the architecture there in situ. All three etchings, however, appear to be based on prints of ancient ruins by other artists.21 They thus provide evidence to the contrary, namely that Segers never saw ancient ruins with his own eyes and therefore resorted to printed prototypes.
The only two known impressions of the etching Roman Ruins are on the recto and verso of the same sheet in the Graphische Sammlung, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (HB 43a-b). The drawing style of this print in the lift-ground technique again strongly recalls the etching of landscapes and ruins by Willem Buytewech (c. 1592-1624). The building in the middle of Segers’s etching, with the two arches and flying buttresses – the remains of a collapsed vault – and the wall with arches on the left, are comparably depicted in an etching by Willem van Nieulandt II (1584-1635), albeit in reverse.22 In borrowing this architectural motif, Segers took so many liberties that the precise identification is no longer applicable to this ruin complex. The impressions on both sides of the same sheet have imperfections and are thus almost certainly trials.
One of Segers’s most curious and difficult to read prints appears on closer inspection to be a variant of the aforementioned and present etching (HB 42). Here, too, is depicted an ancient building with flying buttresses, next to which is a slanting roof covering the remains of an aisle. The structure on the left is also closely related to the one in the Düsseldorf print, but has more niches. Yet another difference is that in the second version the ruins are surrounded by houses. This is also the case in the print after Van Nieulandt (inv. no. RP-P-1924-548) that Segers took as his model for the first version, executed in plain line etching. The execution of the second version is much more complex and probably dates considerably later.
How the print originated has remained unclear until now. Haverkamp-Begemann posited that Segers introduced crosshatching over the entire plate and then printed it as a kind of tone plate, comparable to the tone block of a chiaroscuro woodcut.23 He subsequently would have provided the plate with another second tone by means of a second layer of crosshatching and rendered the buildings and landscape in line etching. He printed the plate on the sheet of paper he had previously printed with the same plate when it still had only the crosshatching. This explanation points us in the right direction; however, what is impractical about the working method described is that after the second alteration of the plate, impressions for the base tone could no longer be made. It seems more plausible, as our research makes clear,24 that Segers printed the etching from two plates: one with fine crosshatching for the light tone, and a second one for the image in line etching and a directly bitten tone in which highlights are reserved with stopping-out varnish.
This working method does indeed compare well with the process of chiaroscuro woodcuts printed with a key block and one or more tone blocks. Segers pulled prints not only with two plates, but also with two colours of ink. Through XRF-analysis of the metals in the ink in the top and bottom parts of the print, we were able to determine that the tone plate was printed with bluish-grey ink with little copper, but the grey and black hues of the ink of the second plate contained more copper than iron. It is thus certain that this is the second etching that Segers printed with two plates. In this instance, he used an additional plate for a ground tone, while for the Landscape with a Plateau, a River in the Distance (HB 25 II b, inv. no. RP-P-H-OB-800) the second plate served for the addition of highlights.
Huigen Leeflang, 2016
J. Springer, Die Radierungen des Herkules Seghers, 3 vols., Berlin 1910-12, no. 49 (Die Landschaft mit Römischen Ruinen), pl. XXXVII; W. Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules Seghers: Ein physiognomischer Versuch, Erlenbach-Zurich and elsewhere 1922, pp. 38, 80-81; W. Doede, ‘Eine neuentdeckte Radierung von Hercules Seghers‘, Westdeutsches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte (Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch), 1938, pp. 244-47 (fig. 162); W. Doede, ‘Hercules Seghers‘, Deutsche Zeitung in den Niederlanden 5-6, 18 October 1942, pp. 150-57; L.C. Collins, Hercules Seghers, Chicago 1953, pp. 23-25 (fig. A); J.Q. van Regteren Altena, ‘Hercules Seghers en de topografie‘, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 3 (1955), pp. 6-8 (fig. 3); E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Hercules Segers: The Complete Etchings, with a Supplement on Johannes Ruischer by E. Trautscholdt, Amsterdam and The Hague 1973, no. 42 and pp. 37, 44-45 (n. 84); F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca. 1450-1700, 72 vols., Amsterdam and elsewhere 1949-2010, XXVI (1981; Hercules Segers), no. 42; J. van der Waals, De prentschat van Michiel Hinloopen. Een reconstructie van de eerste openbare papierkunstverzameling in Nederland, The Hague and Amsterdam 1988, pp. 139-40 (fig. 180) and Appendix 7, no. HB 42; H. Leeflang and P. Roelofs (eds.), Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, 2 vols., exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2016-17, I, no. HB 42
H. Leeflang, 2016, 'Hercules Segers, Roman Ruins, a City in the Distance [HB 42], Amsterdam, c. 1615 - c. 1630', in J. Turner (ed.), Works by Hercules Segers in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.37295
(accessed 10 November 2024 00:28:30).